Chapter 1: The Question at the Fair
The spring fair had taken over the whole block around Station 14, and Nathan Reed had stopped trying to pretend it was an ordinary Saturday.
Bunting sagged between the lamp posts in red, white and blue loops. A brass band from the high school was working its way, bravely and not entirely in tune, through a march on the corner, while children in paper helmets darted between the folding tables with cups of lemonade.
Open day, Derek Webb called it. Recruitment, the chief called it. For Nathan it was something harder than either: a day when he had to be the public version of himself. Captain Reed. Steady, good-humoured, endlessly patient. The version who did not bring the rest of his life through the station door with him.
"You are doing the face," Derek said, appearing at his elbow with two paper cups of coffee and a smear of face paint, green, on one cheek.
"What face?"
"The one where you smile at the public and think about paperwork. A kid painted a dinosaur on me. A dinosaur, Nathan. That is community engagement."
"You have paint on your face and cake on your sleeve," Nathan said. "That is not engagement, that is surrender."
Derek handed him a coffee anyway. They had worked together for eleven years, long enough for Derek to know which of Nathan's silences were comfortable and which were not, and to fill the second kind without being asked. He filled a great many of them in October. It was April now, soft spring light, cherry blossom dropping pink onto the wet pavement, and Nathan was grateful the fair fell in a kind month.
He did the rounds he always did: the thermal camera for Mrs. Abernathy, the bell for a solemn little girl in a wheelchair, half a slice of somebody's mother's blackberry pie, because refusing pie at the Station 14 fair was a graver offence than any in the department rule book.
Between the pie judging and the raffle he was commandeered, briefly, by a father in a Mariners cap who wanted a photograph of his son up in the driver's seat of the ladder truck. The boy was five, perhaps, all elbows and importance, and his father lifted him up one-handed without thinking about it, the way men lift their children ten thousand times and never once count it as strength. Nathan held the door, and counted, and watched the man's other hand stay open at the small of his son's back long after the boy was settled, guarding a fall that was never going to happen. Something about the easiness of it went through him in a place he kept locked. He had a photograph somewhere at home of his own father doing exactly that, two boys and one truck, Daniel grinning down with a front tooth missing. He had not looked at it in years. He told himself, not for the first time, that a man could run a clean, well-ordered life on the things he did not look at.
It was during the quiet after the pie judging, when the crowd had thinned toward the raffle table, that he felt the tug at his sleeve.
It was a small tug. Careful, almost. Not the yank of a child who wanted a sticker or a turn with the hose. He turned, expecting one of the face-painted horde, and found himself looking down at a boy standing very straight and very alone in the noise, with both hands held in front of him, like a person carrying something breakable.
The boy was seven, perhaps, or a small eight. Brown hair cut unevenly, as if someone had done it at a kitchen table with more love than skill. A blue jacket a size too big, the cuffs turned back. He had a seriousness about him that did not belong to a fair at all, the watchfulness of a child who checks where the doors are.
"Hey, buddy," Nathan said, and crouched, because you crouch for the serious ones; towering helped nobody. "Are you lost? Do you want me to find your grown-up?"
The boy did not answer at once. He studied Nathan's face with an intensity that was, for a moment, almost uncomfortable, as if he were comparing it to something he knew by heart and kept getting slightly wrong. His eyes went to Nathan's chin, his hairline, back to his eyes. His mouth worked once, silently, the way a person practises a speech at a bathroom mirror.
"Sir," he said at last, and then stopped, and started again, and his voice, when it came, was small and completely steady, and it went through Nathan like cold water.
"Are you my dad?"
The fair kept going around them. Somewhere the band started up again, off-key and cheerful. A child shrieked with laughter by the ladder truck. Nathan heard all of it as though it were happening behind glass, in another building, to other people.
"I'm sorry," he said. "What did you say?"
"You heard me." The boy's chin came up. There were tears standing in his eyes, and he was furious with them, that was clear; he blinked hard and would not let them fall, and held whatever he was carrying tighter. "I have been looking. Aunt Emma said not to wander off but I saw you on the steps and I knew. Are you my dad?"
Nathan's first, ignoble thought was of the life he had carefully built, in which there were no children, no one waiting, no explanations owed about where he had been for seven years of a small boy's life. His second thought, slower and worse, was simpler: the boy believed it. Completely.
He ran the possibilities the way he had been trained to run a building: quickly, in order, looking for the fire. A prank, some older kid's dare, a camera somewhere waiting for the fire captain's face. A custody mess, an angry parent, a boy coached like a parcel and delivered to the wrong door. He had seen children used as messages before, in his line of work, and he looked for the adult behind this one and found only fairground: bunting, lemonade, a hundred strangers being nobody's anything. And underneath the searching, absurd and unwelcome, a smaller voice, his own at about nine years old, saying: but what if. What if the summer had a piece missing in it that he had never been told about. He shut that down hard. He knew where he had been, every week of that summer, in writing, in triplicate, in Alaska. Whatever this was, it was not a thing that had happened to Nathan Reed. It had happened to his face, which was a different and much older problem.
"Hey," Nathan said gently. "Hey. What's your name?"
"Leo." The boy swallowed. "Leo Collins. I'm seven. I live with my aunt now."
"Leo," Nathan said. "I'm Nathan. Captain Reed. And I think — "
"You are him." The small hands opened at last, and Nathan saw what he had been guarding the whole time, guarding it against the crowd and the weather and perhaps against adults in general, who in Leo's experience might take a thing away before it had done its work.
It was a photograph, printed on paper, creased down the middle and soft at the corners from being folded and unfolded — kept, Nathan registered without knowing why it hurt, in the way people keep the only copy of a thing.
Leo held it out with both hands, solemn as an offering.
Nathan took it.
A beach. Grey-gold light, late summer, Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock behind a laughing couple on the sand, a sailboat at anchor in the shallows. A woman with dark hair blowing across her face, hugely, radiantly pregnant, in a yellow dress. And a man with his arm around her, laughing straight into the camera, sunburned and barefoot.
The man had Nathan's face.
Not a resemblance, the kind strangers remark on in airports. His face — the crooked front tooth, everything but the scar through the left eyebrow that a falling beam had given Nathan at nineteen. Something turned cold and slow in his chest as his eyes hunted and did not find it, because that face was laughing out of a summer he had never lived, with a woman he had never seen before.